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Agonies of an Archbishop

IN February of 2008, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, delivered an address on the fraught subject of “Islam in English Law.” The speech, which circled around the question of whether a civil justice system could accommodate Islamic legal codes, was learned, recondite and occasionally impenetrable. The headlines it generated were not: The head of the Church of England, the newspapers blared, had endorsed Shariah law in Britain. Which he had — sort of, kind of, in the most academic and nuanced and trying-not-to-offend-anyone way imaginable.

For Williams, who announced on Friday that he will lay down his mitre at the end of this year, the Shariah controversy was typical of his tenure. Bearded, kindly and theologically subtle, the archbishop has spent the last 10 years trying to bring an academic’s finesse to issues where finesse often just looks like evasion — the spread of Islam in a de-Christianizing Europe, the divides within the Anglican Communion over homosexuality and women’s ordination, the rise of a combative New Atheism.

But then again his office increasingly demands the impossible of its occupant. These impossibilities have been most apparent in Williams’s lengthy struggle to prevent Episcopalians in the United States and Anglicans in Africa from dividing over homosexuality. But the debate over gay priests and gay bishops is just one manifestation of the larger challenge facing a religious body that remains theoretically headquartered in Europe even as its center of gravity shifts southward, into the heartland of an emerging global Christianity.

This shift isn’t unique to Anglicanism: Roman Catholicism’s decline in the West has likewise been accompanied by striking growth in the developing world. (As the number of Catholic seminarians has dropped in the United States and Europe, for instance, it has risen by 86 percent globally since 1978.) In both churches, this geographic and demographic shift is putting a strain on institutional structures that evolved in a more Eurocentric age.

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Ross DouthatCredit
Josh Haner/The New York Times

Canterbury has historically allowed for more of a theological big tent than Rome. But Anglicans at least shared a common ethnic heritage and cultural context. As the Communion has gone global, those bonds no longer exist.

To be an Anglican bishop in Britain today, for instance, means shepherding a shrinking native-born flock alongside growing immigrant churches, trying to make religion relevant in a cosmopolitan and often anti-Christian culture, and figuring out whether the continent’s growing Muslim communities contain potential allies, potential rivals, or both. But to be a bishop in, say, Nigeria — where Christianity is expanding rapidly, secularism is almost nonexistent, and Islam looks like a mortal foe — means something very different. And asking a Welsh-born theologian to steward a Communion that probably holds more churchgoers in Lagos than Liverpool is a recipe for constant agony.

Here Rowan Williams has borne some of the same burdens as Pope Benedict XVI. The outgoing archbishop of Canterbury and the former Joseph Ratzinger differ theologically and in the scope of their ecclesiastical authority. But both men are European academics trying to speak to Western audiences while leading an increasingly global and post-European church. Both have confronted the same issues (Islam, secularism, sexuality) and both have stumbled into public controversies when their soft-spoken styles collided with intractable challenges.

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These challenges won’t go away, but within a few decades it won’t be elderly Bavarians or Welsh academics who are confronting them. This is probably the last era in which the public face of the world’s major Christian bodies will look the way it did in 1780, or even 1950.

The next pope could well be Latin American or African; if not in the next election, then it’s only a matter of time. And one of the favorites to succeed Rowan Williams as archbishop of Canterbury is John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu, the Ugandan-born archbishop of York, whose biography makes a bridge between the old Christendom and the new.

A hundred years ago, the idea that one of Western Europe’s most ancient religious offices could be occupied by a black man born in Africa would have seemed like something out of science fiction. By the end of this century, in a globalized Anglicanism and Catholicism alike, it will probably seem like the most normal and necessary thing in the world.

Thomas L. Friedman and the public editor are off today.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 18, 2012, on Page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Agonies of an Archbishop. Today's Paper|Subscribe